Londonopolis E-Book

Martin Latham

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 226

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This curious history of London whisks you down the rabbit hole and into the warren of backstreets, landmarks, cemeteries, palaces, markets, museums and secret gardens of the great metropolis. Meet the cockneys, politicians, fairies, philosophers, gangsters and royalty that populate the city, their stories becoming curiouser and curiouser as layers of time and history are peeled back. Find out which tube station once housed the Elgin Marbles and what lies behind a Piccadilly doorway that helped Darwin launch his theory of evolution and caused the Swedes to wage war against Britain. Do you believe in fairies? Do you know which Leadenhall site became a Nag's Head tavern, morphing into the mighty East India Company, before taking flight as the futuristic Lloyds Building? Who named the Natural History Museum's long-tailed dinosaur Mr Whippy? Spanning above and below ground, from the outer suburbs to the inner city, and from the medieval period to the modern day, Londonopolis is a celebration of the weird and the wonderful that makes the mysterious city of London so magical.

Leseprobe

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LONDONOPOLIS

A Curious History of London

MARTIN LATHAM

BATSFORD

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

ANCIENT LONDON

Singing Neanderthal Londoners

Mindful Walking at Terminal Five

Romans in Ecstasy, AD 240–350

MEDIEVAL LONDON

Fairies in London

Hall of the People, 1097

The Jester and the Hospital, 1123

TUDOR LONDON

The Empire that Started in a Tavern

A Winter’s Tale, 1598

Thomas More: from Conkers to Compassion

ENLIGHTENMENT LONDON

The Age of Magical Thinking, 1650–1800

Downstairs in Piccadilly

The Melancholy King of Kensington Palace

The Incognito Tsar, 1698

Moments of Being

Carving Silence, 1670

VICTORIAN LONDON

A Ghost Story, 1882

Tick Tock: Falling in Love with Big Ben

Red Annie and Eleanor Marx

Passionate Intensity at the Natural History Museum

Flinging a Pot of Paint in the Face of the Public

TWENTIETH-CENTURY LONDON

Taking Tea in the Tomb

The Secret of Millionaires’ Row

Lost in the Underground

The Concrete Jungle

Bookshops and Booksellers

Four Shops, Four Women

THE SECRET THAMES

Secret Streams

A Mystic River

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am ever-grateful to my PhD supervisor, Peter Marshall of Kings College London for teaching me to research. He and I often stayed in the old British Museum Reading Room until 9 pm, then walked out past Ramses’ statue in the gloom. My father, a cockney bibliophile, numismatist and dowser, was a sergeant-major and sometime gravedigger who understood the city from the clay upwards. He also deserves space here.

In any endeavour, I remember my mother’s perennial injunction: ‘Don’t worry if you don’t fit into their sausage machine’. My brothers helped: John is a polymath who rediscovered an orchid on a roundabout, and taught me obscure poets and painters, Paul is a polemical conservation architect who has inspired me much and Mike, although Patton-esque, first told me about fairies in Holland Park when I was five. With Sarah, my sister, I have accomplished many enjoyable odysseys across the city.

Waterstones people have taught me about so many books and ideas: the company is my third university. I thank Tim Waterstone, the Sun King, for hiring me 26 years ago, and James Daunt for keeping it all going, like Cardinal Richelieu. Waterstones has led to conversations with David Mitchell, Will Self, Jenny Uglow and Peter Ackroyd. They have all deepened my understanding of London. Ackroyd has moved London writing into a new-found land of poetic erudition. The old atrophy without the young: Josh Houston at Yale University Press has repeatedly broadened my horizons. The irrepressible Paul Maycock of Craenen is a fellow cartophile. Orc-like, I have mined Robert Sherston-Baker’s labyrinthine Chaucer Bookshop and found unimagined treasures there. Suzi, Luke and Sarah run the best bookshop café in the world; much of the joy in this book comes from them.

I wrote this book whilst working full-time: Simon and Rachael Halle-Smith gave encouragement, potations and endless kindness. Jenny and Blaise carried on helping me even when their home flooded. Mark and Lorna Swain’s house has been an oasis for the imagination. I thank my children: Ailsa and her Rivendellian husband Adam gave me confidence, the thought of Oliver’s quick wit kept the book clear, India’s enthusiasm is rooted in a dharma-level wisdom, Caspar’s Chestertonian conversation inspired me, and William’s humour kept melancholy at bay. My stepchildren endured my anecdotes, Francesca told me to write them down – possibly to shut me up – Jack brought me a wonderful artichoke dish and Sam makes great coffee.

Kate Gunning found out where you can see the Fleet River, and her friendship underpins the whole book. My agent Sophie Lambert is an eagle-eyed Yoda. At Batsford, Kristy Richardson was warmly supportive; Polly and Tina are my fairy godmothers. Joe McLaren added magic, humour and a poetic warmth to my text. My wife Claire gave love and understanding, and weeded the text of obscurities. In working full-time and running the house while I wrote she showed the endurance powers of two of her heroes, Dervla Murphy the traveller, and Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

INTRODUCTION

As a boy, London was like a fairy-tale city to me. The other tenants in my house (apart from us eight kids and my parents) were a female spy, a fading actress, a newly arrived Irish family and the mysterious Miss White, a Dickensian spinster. In Earls Court Road I remember a grocer’s shop where the queue included Arab women in burqas and a beautiful transvestite. My father helped the women work out their change using his wartime Arabic. The local sweet shop was run by Pathans. I used to walk for hours randomly across London and it never disappointed: I found India in Southall High Road, and old Beirut in Edgware Road by night. Reggae throbbed in Notting Hill and Kilburn pubs resounded to Irish freedom songs. The marching music of the Changing of the Guard gave me goosebumps. I remember a Sherlock Holmes-style ‘pea-souper’ fog, and the silence of Churchill’s funeral. History was all around in such a way that I got temporal vertigo, that sensation of suddenly seeing the past as a reality. Walking to school I would mentally spool back to see dinosaurs lumbering down Kensington High Street.

The Victorian historian Macaulay imagined an artist from New Zealand sitting on a broken arch of London Bridge, sketching the ruins of London. What if that artist asked what the city was like? You could give him a pile of facts, but he might get a better idea if you were to open a magic casement or two onto different moments of London’s past. That is what I have tried to do.

You can read this book in any order, or leave it in the lavatory for the occasional reverie. It is neither guide book nor conventional history. In A Passage to India, Forster says of Aziz, ‘yes, it was all true of him but somehow his essence was slain’. London, like Aziz, cannot be encapsulated. To Shelley it was ‘that great sea that still howls for more’, and Charles Lamb ‘often shed tears in the motley Strand for fullness of joy at so much life’. Carlyle, in a mile-high balloon basket in 1863, swore he could hear London’s strange music, a sort of composite sigh.

Writers feature prominently. It is an inky city, a capital of books more than any city in the world. From Chaucer to Dickens, you can hear the saltiness of London speech. Music made in London also has a London stamp, from Purcell and Handel to The Kinks and The Clash. London has rocked the world and the three-note beat preceding the words ‘We Will Rock You’ was first stamped out by Brian May almost by accident on the wooden floor of a North London church hall.

It is also a city of extraordinary silences. It is a commercial hub full of philosophers and meditators, a roaring place where suddenly you can turn, as Dickens did, into Wardrobe Place and hear only chirping sparrows echoing on old stones. Places like Kensal Green Cemetery, Holland Park and Rainham Marshes are ancient country, which, unlike much of Britain, have never been sprayed with chemicals. To stop rowing on the mighty Thames and simply glide along is mystically calming.

Londoners love their history but this alchemical city does not get weighed down by it too much. A blue plaque in Camden reads ‘On this site in 1782 nothing happened’.

SINGING NEANDERTHAL LONDONERS

London has been occupied for 500,000 years: Neanderthal man dropped stone tools near Waterloo Station, east of Richmond Bridge and close to the Sikh temple in Woolwich. A particularly fine hand axe from 400,000 BC, now in the London Museum, was found near St Paul’s Cathedral. Archaeologists have refined the Neanderthal’s caveman reputation: yes, he was bull-headed and low-browed, and his ‘close encounter’ hunting style gave him as many injuries as a rodeo rider, but he was no grunting orc.

His communication was often more sophisticated than our jabbering, for, although language had yet to evolve, he used ‘musilanguage’, a singing communication. Tone of voice is still perhaps more important between us than the words used; even dogs react to our intonation and tone – our musilanguage – more than to our words. So the first Londoners can be imagined – tall and athletic, hunting in groups and intoning to each other with expressive hand gestures and facial expressions. They laughed as well, for that activity, like singing, predated words. The recent eyebrow-raising discovery that modern man had sex and subsequent progeny with these singing Neanderthals makes them intimately part of modern London.1

They were immigrants, of course, descendants of the ‘bipedal hominids’, as archaeologists romantically call early prototypes of man, who arrived, via Europe, from Kenya a million years ago. They flooded in unchecked roughly along the route of the current A2 from Dover (see box), a chalk ridge which is Britain’s oldest highway (the English Channel is only 400,000 years old).

Charles Dickens’s character David Copperfield walked the route in the other direction from London, to stay with the eccentric Betsey Trotwood on the Kent coast. Dickens had an eye for such temporal vertigo: one muddy day he suddenly imagined a pre-Neanderthal London and saw ‘a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’.

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Notes

1. See Stephen Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005); Ewen Callaway, ‘Mystery Humans Spiced Up Ancients’ Sex Lives’, Nature (19 November 2013).

MINDFUL WALKING AT TERMINAL FIVE

Deep in the forest 32km (20 miles) from Warsaw is a granite boulder recording the death, in 1627, of the last auroch. Fossils from India show that aurochs roamed the earth two million years ago. We mostly know them from the marvellous Lascaux cave paintings in France, which show the bulls with their 76cm (30in) forward-pointing horns, rich chestnut coats and white spinal stripe. The skull of the Polish beast – a spinster auroch who died naturally – was stolen by invading Swedish troops and is now in Stockholm Museum. These Tolkienesque beasts weighed a tonne. Eyewitness accounts are tremulous.

PREHISTORIC LONDONERS

Scroll forward to Holloway Lane, a busy road north of Heathrow and west of Southall. It has some listed artisans’ houses, and, being near the airport, plenty of car-hire firms. Here, in 1800 BC, in a warm and wooded London, hunters killed a large auroch and cut it up for food. It took six arrows to kill it and, when archaeologists studied the flint arrowheads in 1985, they found traces of animal fat and, to lubricate entry, beeswax.

This area, the London borough of Hillingdon, with its large and friendly Indian population (and Border Agency detention blocks), was a major site in prehistoric times. Just north of Holloway Lane, in Uxbridge, reindeer and horses were butchered in a settlement that lasted for thousands of years. The Uxbridge camps were carefully sited to intercept the annual reindeer migration up the Thames Valley.

These early Londoners favoured higher ground. Much of the London area was marshy alongside the Thames, which was not embanked. This was fine for the many beavers and hippos that lived there but, at Upminster in the east (on the modern District Line), both a young elephant and a woolly mammoth got stuck in swampland and died of starvation. So Hampstead Heath, then as now, was popular with humanity; many campfire hearths have been found there, with thousands of flint tools dating back to 7000 BC. Over at King’s Cross, a mammoth was killed. The skeleton, with the hand axe used to butcher it, was found in 1690 – one of the earliest realizations of London’s exotic prehistoric past. With flint factories discovered at Southwark and Woolwich, a 1500 BC jetty at Vauxhall and evidence of contemporary wooden buildings at Westminster and Waterloo, it now seems arbitrary to see London as a Roman invention.

THESE PRE-ROMAN LONDONERS, LIVING AT THE SAME TIME AS STONEHENGE WAS ERECTED, WERE LIKE MODERN LONDONERS IN MANY WAYS. THEY LEFT A LOT OF RUBBISH, THEY DRANK A LOT OF BOOZE AND THEY WERE CULINARILY ADVENTUROUS.

These pre-Roman Londoners, living at the same time as Stonehenge was erected, were like modern Londoners in many ways. They left a lot of rubbish, they drank a lot of booze and they were culinarily adventurous. But what of their spiritual life? This is a mystery, but London does possess one of the most suggestive of all structures from the period: at Heathrow there is a cursus – a long, straight track with raised earth banks on either side – constructed in about 3000 BC.

THE HEATHROW CURSUS

Stonehenge has the other major cursus in Britain, which in 2007 was dated to 3600 BC. It is over 3.2km (2 miles) long and 91.5m (100yd) wide. The Heathrow cursus was first spotted in 1943 from the air. It is so long, straight and flat – 4km (2½ miles) long and 18.25m (20yd) wide – that it was thought to be a Roman road. The construction of Terminal Five, although unpopular with local residents, was a chance to study it. This seven-year operation became the biggest dig ever conducted in Britain. A total of 80,000 objects were found, including a ritually important worked stone from Cornwall and the only wooden bowl known from the Bronze Age: romantic finds from a dig which centred on the wonderfully named Perry Oaks Sludge Works.

Traces of a large roundhouse, too big to be a residence, confirmed the ritual importance of this sacred landscape, but what was the ritual? Archaeologists are victims of their era. Victorians, muscularly Christian, saw human sacrifice and barbarity at Stonehenge; the ‘slaughter stone’ there is their nomenclature. Current orthodoxy leans towards Stonehenge being an internationally important healing centre. The cursus links sacred sites there, and surely this explains the Heathrow cursus, rather than the gauntlet-running theory that goes back to William Stukeley, the eighteenth-century historian who thought up the name ‘cursus’, or ‘racetrack’.

It was a processional way, aligned on the winter sunset, for the sort of meditative walking that is a human need: consider the circumambulations of Mount Kailash by Hindus or of stupas by Buddhists, or the walking of cloisters by monks. Indeed, many of us like to think things over during a solitary walk. The Latin term Solvitur ambulando means ‘By walking it is solved’.

FROM CURSUS TO TRAVELATOR

The holidays that begin at Heathrow are not unlike an ancient cathartic ceremony, so I think that if the builders of the cursus were transported through time they would understand the functions of the airport once they had got over the shock of the existence of aeroplanes. The way that airport visitors display physical affection would not surprise them either. In Terminal Five they would also find the only ‘temple’ in London congenial to their lost beliefs: the prayer room run by the Heathrow chaplaincy, whose mission is ‘to minister to those of all faiths and none, to be a non-anxious presence in stressful times and to encourage social cohesion’. This is probably what the cursus builders were all about too: the dig report concludes that the Heathrow community of 3000 BC was ‘a more stable and equitable society’ than anywhere else in the south-east, and explains that the cursus would have ‘bonded the inhabitants of the area in a spirit of shared purpose’.1

I THINK THAT IF THE BUILDERS OF THE CURSUS WERE TRANSPORTED THROUGH TIME THEY WOULD UNDERSTAND THE FUNCTIONS OF THE AIRPORT ONCE THEY HAD GOT OVER THE SHOCK OF THE EXISTENCE OF AEROPLANES.

Empire of the Sun author J. G. Ballard, a lover of London fringe-lands and of airports, lived at Shepperton, near Heathrow. He wrote that ‘We’re all looking for a vertical route out of the concrete jungle we’re living in.’ In a 1997 essay called ‘Airports: Cities of the Future’, he praises their egalitarian ethos and ‘easy camaraderie’. At Heathrow, he points out, nostalgia and kitsch are absent (‘I have never seen a pebble-dashed Control Tower’) and everyone briefly becomes a world citizen.2 Bulldoze the gentrified stucco terraces of London, he suggests. Mankind, he says, is truly happy at the check-in desk, in transit to a better state of being – like the person, I suggest, at one end of the cursus. The excited travellers gliding along the travelators of Terminal Five are the direct successors of prehistoric walkers. So, whether it is the mysterious civilization of the Heathrow sacred landscape, or the airport itself, Heathrow shows us an alternative London, a launch pad for the psyche.

It is good to end on a mystery. Every cursus in the country has one embankment higher than the other. Why? Nobody knows.

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Notes

1. ‘Archaeology at Terminal Five’, available on the official Heathrow Airport website. The site has a nice animation of crowds on the cursus observing the sunrise at winter solstice.

2. ‘Airports: Cities of the Future’, Blueprint September 1997. See also Prehistoric Avenues and Alignments (English Heritage, 2011) and Christopher Chippindale’s Stonehenge Complete (Thames and Hudson, 2012).

ROMANS IN ECSTASY, AD 240–350

The excavation of London’s Roman Temple of Mithras, discovered during rebuilding work in 1954, was an exciting time for a 49-year-old Welshman called William Grimes. Grimes, the son of a draughtsman in Pembroke docks, was the director of the London Museum and became an overnight celebrity, with his flaming red hair and trademark red carnation buttonhole. After a superb head of Mithras was found on the last day allowed by developers for the dig, a parliamentary debate was held: a motion was passed to continue the excavation.

Not only was the temple archaeologically sensational, with the finest Roman sculptures found in Britain, but Grimes worked on the dig with an older woman called Audrey Williams. Grimes and Audrey, a feisty Oxford graduate who had already married twice, fell in love. The archaeologist divorced his childhood sweetheart Barbara – the mother of his two children – and married Audrey in 1959. Making a clean break with William’s past, Audrey renamed him Peter, after the contemporary Britten opera, much to his colleagues’ irritation. After Audrey’s death the priapic Grimes, at 76, married the youngish Molly Douglas (aged 54). Poor old Molly: Grimes’s ashes were to be buried with Audrey’s.

The temple floor can still be seen in the bustling financial heart of the City: you can go there and allow it to take you on a mental journey to an ancient world of pagan gods. For here were conducted the most extraordinary rituals ever seen in London – rituals rooted in the minds of cave-painting man.

MITHRAS

Mithras (Mitra in ancient India and Mesopotamia) was worshipped as a god of friendship, constancy and courage. The cult flourished in ancient Iran, surviving into Roman times among Turkish pirates; after the Roman emperor had settled the pirates in Calabria, southern Italy, it soon spread to Rome.

Mithraism, a secretive cult, remains mysterious. Its practices are only known from a few scraps of papyrus, a vase painting in Mainz, Germany, frescoes in other Mithras temples, and from two early Christian accounts, written when the cult was being suppressed. It was the most popular religion among Roman soldiers, and there are Mithras temples, or Mithrea, all over the ancient world – from Spain to Syria, from Iraq to Bagram in Afghanistan, and of course in Rome, which has over 600. A rare Roman poem about a Mithraeum begins:

This is the place, auspicious and sacred, holy and favourable.1

INSIDE THE MITHRAEUM

London’s Mithraeum was carefully sited next to the Walbrook stream. Fresh water was needed and the Walbrook – ‘stream of the Britons’ – was inhabited by water spirits. Offerings have been found on the old stream bed, including a lead oblong with a woman’s name written backwards, as a way of cursing her. But the site was marshy – even in 1954 Grimes battled with water just 1.2m (4ft) down – so the buttresses of the 18.25 × 6m (60 × 20ft) temple were massive and deep.

OFFERINGS HAVE BEEN FOUND ON THE OLD STREAM BED, INCLUDING A LEAD OBLONG WITH A WOMAN’S NAME WRITTEN BACKWARDS, AS A WAY OF CURSING HER.

All the temples to Mithras have the same format, being built to look, from within, like caves – and so are windowless. Ceilings were usually painted as dark blue star charts. Initiates were handed a sacred drink by a man wearing a mask depicting a raven’s head and went through seven stages, emulating different beasts. (In a throwback to Mithraism’s ancient roots, loose trousers were worn; Romans usually saw trousers as barbaric.) St Jerome (AD 347–420) said that they flapped their arms like birds and roared like lions, but recent scholarship is less dismissive; the whole religion seems to have been aimed at inducing, through guided breathing exercises and a psycho-dramatic rebirth, a profound happiness, beloved of Socrates, called eudaimonia. It sounds crazy, but is perhaps no crazier than any modern religion, baldly described.

The London Mithraeum went out of fashion in about AD 250, but fortunately for us, its sculptures were carefully buried under the floor. They are now in the Museum of London. With the pragmatism typical of Londoners, the building became a temple to Bacchus for a while before it gently subsided back into the marshy ground, about 700 years before the Tower of London was built.

So, hard by the mayor’s Mansion House with its stifling ceremonial, and the Bank of England with its liveried flunkies, was a sunken cave-temple where, for over a century, Romans descended in search of an ancient ecstasy.

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Note

1. Jonas Bjornebye, The Cult of Mithras, Ph.D. thesis, University of Bergen, Norway, 2007. Having read this dense study I feel, like Jonas, very grateful to Felix and Pio, his two sons, who were born during the writing and had to vie with the lure of an ancient deity for their father’s time. J. North and S. Price’s The Religious History of the Roman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2011) explodes many myths about Mithras being a Roman invention, and reinstates the role of women in Mithraism. You would never guess at Grimes’s raffish ways from the magisterial tone of his dig write-up in Recent Archaeological Excavations, edited by R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford (Routledge, 1956), a book worth seeing for the wonderful paintings of the temple in its marshy London setting, complete with raven-headed men.

FAIRIES IN LONDON

Surprisingly, London is the worldwide hotspot for fairy sightings and fairy lore. Tudor times were the high tide of fairy beliefs, but our little friends stayed around right up to modern times. Fairies are the successors of the ancient water nymphs and woodland spirits (such as fauns and dryads) that Christianity drove underground into so-called folklore. As the Londoner Geoffrey Chaucer put it, holy friars’ prayers frightened away the fairies. Shakespeare’s fairy king, Oberon, was a tougher sprite and boasted of not being frightened by church bells.

Academics have not flocked to fairy studies, and are puzzled by Shakespeare’s interest in them. They routinely suggest that the passage in Romeo and Juliet in which Mercutio describes a fairy carriage in hallucinogenic detail must be a passage inserted by another writer. More likely, perhaps, Shakespeare was merely reflecting common beliefs and a contemporary fascination. One of his heroes, Smithfield lad Edmund Spenser, wrote the epic twelve-book poem The Faerie Queen. (Spenser died in 1699 aged 46. At his funeral in Westminster Abbey, his fellow poets threw unpublished poems into his grave.)

As the revered historian Keith Thomas admits in his definitive study on religion and magic, ‘In Elizabethan times fairy lore was accepted literally at a popular level.’ In London, food and water were often left out for fairies, just as modern children leave food for Santa’s reindeer.1

Fairies could be mischievous, but were useful household deities. They pinched would-be adulterers. Maids, upon spilling milk, would say: ‘Robin jogged me’ (Robin Goodfellow was the Artful Dodger of fairies). Waking up with tangled hair, or elf-locks, was evidence of fairies at play and if cutlery disappeared, fairies had borrowed it, a nicely stress-free way to deal with such losses. As Westminster poet Robert Herrick said in 1631, fairies had a moral code, ‘a mixt religion part pagan part papist’.

Two London court cases shed incidental light on fairy beliefs in the capital. In 1595, Judith Phillips was whipped through the City for extracting money from the public with the promise of meeting the Queen of the Fairies. Sir Anthony Ashley was more ambitious. In 1610 he was fined for extortion on multiple counts; he had been taking money from ‘dupes’ by promising that he could arrange for them to marry the Queen of the Fairies.

The First Lord of the Admiralty, Goodwin Wharton MP, was an unusually high-profile fairy-believer, who in 1688 pursued their treasure under Somerset House in the Strand, but only succeeded in unleashing four devils, one of whom shot out of the window and over the Thames ‘with a hiss’. At Wharton’s next excavation, under a house in Holborn, nothing was found but not, he felt, because nothing was there: he left a £50 tip for the fairies. When Wharton’s lover complained of his lack of sexual arousal, he explained that he was exhausted: the Queen of the Fairies had engaged in vigorous sex with him as he slept.

THE FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY, GOODWIN WHARTON MP, WAS AN UNUSUALLY HIGH-PROFILE FAIRY-BELIEVER, WHO IN 1688 PURSUED THEIR TREASURE UNDER SOMERSET HOUSE IN THE STRAND, BUT ONLY SUCCEEDED IN UNLEASHING FOUR DEVILS, ONE OF WHOM SHOT OUT OF THE WINDOW AND OVER THE THAMES ‘WITH A HISS’.

BELIEFS DURING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Even at the heart of eighteenth-century London, an interest in fairies lingered. Several Royal Society members, including British Museum founder Sir Hans Sloane and George Graham, inventor of the mercury pendulum, formed the occult Cabala Club, which met upstairs at the Sun Tavern next to St Paul’s churchyard. A founder club member, John Byrom, possessed written invocations to summon up ‘the Queen of the Pharies’.

A London notable who went public with his belief in fairies was Regency scientist Sir Humphry Davy, lecturer in chemistry at the Royal Institution and the discoverer of several elements. He described fairies’ wings in detail, and their cosmic hangout on Saturn. Davy’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge once reflected that he could never be really close to Wordsworth because the Lakeland bard did not believe in fairies. As Coleridge put it, ‘We cannot live on matter-of-factness alone.’ As with Shakespeare, Coleridge knew that the fairy realm was a way to access inwardness and the wisdom of the unconscious.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE ONCE REFLECTED THAT HE COULD NEVER BE REALLY CLOSE TO WORDSWORTH BECAUSE THE LAKELAND BARD DID NOT BELIEVE IN FAIRIES. AS COLERIDGE PUT IT, ‘WE CANNOT LIVE ON MATTER-OF-FACTNESS ALONE’.